Silence

Since last the summer broke above her
A flash of lightning from his thunder-sheath,
Silence has never left her cover
In the heather on the heath.

Across her refuge peers the steeple,
And with its fingers shakes its bells;
Around her prowl the vehicles,
Laden with uproarious people;
Around her, where the fir-trees end,
In its rut the cart-wheel grates;
But never a noise has strength to rend
The tense, dead space where silence waits.

Since the last loud thunder weather,
Silence has stirred not in the heather;
And the heath, wherein the evenings sink,
Beyond the endless thickets, and
The purple mounds of hidden sand,
Lengthens her haunts to heaven's brink.

And even winds stir not the slim
Larches at the marsh's rim,
Where she will glass her abstract eyes
In pools where wondering lilies rise;
And only brushes her the clouds'
Shadow when they rush in crowds,
Or else the shadow of a flight
Of hovering hawks at heavens' height.

Since the last flash of lightning streaked the plain,
Nothing has bitten, in her vast domain.

And those who in her realm did roam,
Whether it were in dawn or gloam,
They all have felt their hearts held fast
In spells of mystery she has cast.
She, like an ample, final force,
Keeps on the same unbroken course;

Black walls of pinewoods gloom and bar
The paths of hope that gleam afar;
Clusters of dreamy junipers
Frighten the feet of wanderers;
Malignant mazes intertwine
With paths of cunning curve and line,
And the sun every moment shifts
The goal to which confusion drifts.

Since the lightning that the storm forged bit,
The bitter silence at the corners four
Of the heath, has changed no whit.

The shepherds with their hundred years worn out,
And the spent dogs that follow them about,
See her, on golden dunes where shadows flit,
Or in the noiseless moorland, sometimes sit,
Immense, beneath the outspread wing of Night;
Then waters on the wrinkled pond take fright;
And the heather veils itself and palely glistens,
And every leaf in every thicket listens,
And the incendiary sunset stills
The last cry of his light that o'er her thrills.

And the hamlets neighbouring her, beneath
Their thatch of hovels on the heath,
Shiver with terror, feeling her
Dominant, though she do not stir;
Mournful, and tired, and helpless they
Stand in her presence as at bay,
And watch benumbed, and nigh to swoon,
Fearing, when mists shall lift, to see,
Suddenly opening under the moon,
The silver eyes of her mystery.